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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23777884">My body, bloodstained temple of thy divinity</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/ViolettaValery/pseuds/ViolettaValery'>ViolettaValery</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>(but they get better), Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Gods &amp; Goddesses, BAMF Alex Manes, Breathplay, Child Abuse, Devotion, Eventual Happy Ending, God Michael Guerin, Handprint (Roswell), Heavy Angst, Homophobia, Human Alex Manes, Internalized Homophobia, Jesse Manes is His Own Warning, Loyalty, M/M, Minor Isabel Evans/Rosa Ortecho, Minor Max Evans/Liz Ortecho, POV Alternating, Power Imbalance, Prayer, Predicament Bondage, Rath - Freeform, Recovery, Self-Flagellation, Self-Harm, Self-Worth Issues, Swordfighting, Under-negotiated Kink, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships, Wax Play, apotheosis, prayer kink, religious homophobia</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-04-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-04-25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-02 20:40:26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>10,800</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23777884</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/ViolettaValery/pseuds/ViolettaValery</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Michael does not get involved in the affairs of mortals. </p><p>The first time he truly notices a human in millennia is when he hears one sing to him, the words and music his own creation. The chords he plucks from the strings have an innocence to them, reverberating with devotion where they lack artfulness. It reminds him of the old days, when worship brought beauty into the world.</p><p>Alex discovers beauty when he is young, and he falls in love with the beauty of a contradiction.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Michael Guerin/Alex Manes</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>57</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>71</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Prologue</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This is an angsty fic, y'all. The first full chapter pretty unflinchingly depicts religious homophobia and the ensuing self-hate and self-harm, as well as a constellation of other issues around that. It may be triggering, so approach with care. But though the beginning is emotionally brutal, the following chapters are a story of recovery. I don't do angst purely for the sake of angst; there will be a payoff and a happy ending. </p><p>Many thanks to my dearest @winged-fool, @alexanderlightweight, and @ninswhimsy for helping me through this fic like so many others.</p><p>Title is a creative transformation of a line from one of John Donne's Holy Sonnets: My self, a temple of Thy Spirit divine.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Even gods have rules that they live by.</p><p>Michael has just one: he does not get involved in the affairs of mortals. They have been committing stupidities for millennia, as he loves to tell his fellow gods, and they will continue to do so for millennia more. His intervention would be a lost cause, for human nature is a much more powerful god than he is.</p><p>So he watches.</p><p>Sometimes, he answers prayers.</p><p>He appears in visions to painters who beg for a glimpse of him.</p><p>But humans have forgotten what he is, warped his image and twisted his words, and he has no love for them. And he certainly does not believe in the prophecy, so old that even most of the gods have forgotten it, that claims that a human will come, chosen by Michael himself, to remake the world anew.</p><p>For that, they would have to know how to create, not destroy.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>This is the chapter that earns all the warnings, friends. Please be kind to yourselves. It's a heavy one, but I promise there's light after the darkness.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Alex discovers beauty when he is young, and he falls in love with it.</p><p>His father, the High Priest, wages only war and destruction in Michael’s name. To him, Michael is a god fed on spilled blood and carnage, death and raging fire, and Jesse Manes lives to slake his thirst.</p><p>But to Alex, his god is beautiful, golden curls and soulful eyes and a perfect form, strength and kindness all at once. Alex devours in secret the sacred texts that tell of wonders Michael made out of the ashes of what he destroyed. He thirstily drinks in his god’s every recorded word, woven into speeches with gossamer threads of eloquence that reveal a world of order and numbers, laws and ratios and symmetry. He learns, with his god’s help, to find the patterns that make up his world, fractals and crystal lattices, the inevitable growth and decay that resolve again into perfect balance. He reads the stories woven into the stars of the night sky, and then he learns to see the forces that move them.</p><p>But most importantly, he discovers that Michael is a god who does not <em>annihilate, </em>but destroys to make anew, the ever-repeating cycle of being. He is the duality of life itself.</p><p>Alex falls in love with the beauty of that contradiction.</p><p>Unthinking in his unbridled reverence, he points out to his father that there was a time when humans created in Michael’s name as much as they destroyed.</p><p>His father beats him for it. Humans are too weak, too flawed, to create, he explains. They can only destroy, to pave the way for their god’s creation. They build no more temples in Michael’s honor, only worship those that remained from ages past (and Alex sees, in every one, the subtle play of forces that keep them standing, reaching into the very sky where the gods reside). They conquer, and repurpose their new hallowed edifices in honor of their god. They make do with dilapidated structures, praising their god as they raze cities and burn the earth.</p><p>In the quiet of a barren temple, grey stone adorned with nothing but a sole sculpture of his god, Alex kneels and sings his own song of benediction to Michael.</p><p>…..</p><p>The first time Michael truly <em>notices </em>a human in millennia is when he hears one sing to him, the words and music his own creation. The chords he plucks from the strings have an innocence to them, reverberating with devotion where they lack artfulness. It reminds him of the old days, when worship brought beauty into the world.</p><p>…..</p><p>The first time Alex picks up a blade and swings it through the air, he feels that same awe that fills him every time he enters a temple. The sword is heavy, and yet it fits perfectly into his hand, and it does not take long before he feels as if he is one with it.</p><p>He trains with Kyle, who, Alex knows, will be expected to lead the troops in battle. But Kyle has little interest in the sword, preferring to study medicine, and Alex bests him easily on the training ground. Even his father, stern and severe as weathered stone, looks at him with something like approval when he does.</p><p>“It will not be long before you are on the battlefield,” he tells Alex. “Then you will be able to worship your god properly.”</p><p>A war is, technically, the decision of the King, a ruler anointed by Michael himself, but Alex knows that the High Priest wields far more power than the King. He holds enough sway over the people that should King Valenti protest, his father would have him toppled from his throne for blasphemy.</p><p>Jesse Manes is intent on having war, and he is intent on his sons fighting in that war.</p><p>But, in secret, Alex continues to make music for his god. Too young still for battle, he has this way, at least, to worship the god who is his world.</p><p>….</p><p>The only art that adorns the otherwise barren palace are paintings and sculptures of the deity they all serve, in his two forms as a benevolent god of creation and a wrathful god of destruction. His father prefers his god in his image as Rath, all fire and fury, but Alex also loves the paintings of Michael, aglow with what seems like divine light though it is only sunlight.</p><p>Now he admires one such painting, in which Michael stands naked and unashamed, at ease in a contrapposto position, his curls haloing his head as he smiles, by turns beatific and wicked. Alex had always thought Michael beautiful, but as he gazes at this canvas, he feels inside him the first stirrings of something he’s never felt before. He does not know what it is, only that it takes over his entire being, drawing him inexplicably to Michael as a part of him that has always been quiescent until now comes alive.  </p><p>His father chances upon him in that moment. He sees Alex’s parted lips, sees Alex’s body betraying him.</p><p>His beats Alex and throws him into a dungeon.</p><p>“To desire a man is sin, and you would defile even your <em>god </em>with such a sin?” he demands, and Alex has no answer.</p><p>He has always known, or always been told, at least, that to desire another man is sin, to lie with one even more so. For as long as he can remember, that has been his father’s refrain, even though he could find no corroboration in the texts he so devoutly read; for centuries, it had been the faith’s refrain. Who was he to question it?</p><p>But then he’d looked up at Michael and felt the first stirrings of desire. It was so new and unfamiliar that he hadn’t even recognized it for what it was, let alone drawn the connection between what he felt and the prohibitions that had been that had been preached to him his entire life. Before today, that desire had always been a sin committed by others.</p><p>So after his father tells him he’s sinned against the god he loves, then leaves him, cold and hungry, in a dungeon for three days to contemplate the error of his ways, he no longer needs his father’s aid to inflict punishment on himself. He is more than happy to take matters into his own hands. His father still watches at first, his gaze unyielding as Alex kneels and swings the flogger, until he is satisfied that Alex will not shirk his duty.</p><p>But he is a young man in the bloom of youth, and his body grows and aches and desires. He wakes frequently in the night or the morning to a hardened cock, and most of the time, manages to bring himself to climax with his hand alone, curtailing his fantasies before they can even begin. But there are also those times when, touching himself, his mind will wander before he can stop it; some nights, he wakes from dreams of holding a man’s body in a firm embrace, their twin desires pressed against each other, panting, wanting, kissing, and the other man always wears his god’s form.</p><p>On those nights, he reaches for the flogger that rests by his bed and offers his penance, but it never succeeds at chasing the dreams away for good, and Alex wonders if he is too tainted even for pain to scourge his sin from him.</p><p>…..</p><p>Alex starts to pray to him for forgiveness regularly now, begging ceaselessly to be cleansed and made good, and Michael struggles to understand why, for he is already pure. He spills his blood and his tears onto hallowed ground, and for the first time in centuries, Michael aches for a human.</p><p>He wraps Alex in peace and warmth when the human curls up on the stone floor of the temple to sleep, naked and bleeding.</p><p>…..</p><p>All his brothers had been taught to flagellate themselves for their sins: a word spoken blasphemously, an act their father deems cowardice in battle. Occasionally, their promiscuity, for though there is no prohibition against lust itself, and though his brothers’ desires do not bear the taint that Alex’s do, the faith still frowns upon vaunting too proudly the successful slaking of that desire.</p><p>So it is only Alex who bears the scars of his flagellations by the time he is of age to ride into battle. The older ones pull at him when he moves, sometimes; that was before he’d learned to have himself cared for, after. He was of no use to his god if he was too damaged to fight for him.</p><p>The first time he is sent into battle, his heart thunders, but it is not with fear. He is not afraid of death, only of failing his god. But as he swings his sword and his enemies fall, he comes alive with the breath of his god just as he does when he makes music. He spills blood in worship, and the ecstasy of it dulls the pain of the wounds he receives.  </p><p>After, he is welcomed home a hero, before his father interrupts the celebration to remind them that his soon was but a tool in the hands of a higher power. They should worship Michael, not Alex.</p><p>Alex bows his head, agreeing. He kneels to pray in the temple that night, offering as a gift to Michael every drop of blood he has spilled.</p><p>….</p><p>Alex waters the fields with blood in his name. Humans have always destroyed for him, but for centuries they have done it with hate, calling his name down onto their own bloodlust.</p><p>Alex kills with love for him, his whole being devoted to Rath as he fights and bleeds, and Michael grows stronger with his worship. Power thrums in his veins as it has not in centuries, and it grows stronger still when Alex returns from battle to make music in his name.</p><p>…..</p><p>Alex comes to cherish those two ecstasies, of spilling blood for Rath and composing hymns for Michael. They are his two guiding lights, which make it easy to bear when he must kneel and scourge the impurities from his flesh.   </p><p>Then, in a battle, his horse falls and he with it. He’s killed his opponent, a general from the opposing side that he knows will send their troops into disarray, but his rearing horse rams into Alex’s, and though he has been trained to fall in such a way as to escape injury, that proves impossible in the chaos of men and horses. His leg is crushed, and with the other wounds he has already sustained, it proves too much; he begins to lose consciousness.</p><p>He returns to it only in the makeshift healers’ tent. Kyle had gotten his way from his father, in the end, convincing the King to allow him to go to battle as a healer rather than a fighter. Now, Alex is on the receiving end of his entire attention, perhaps in respect of the friendship they once had, or perhaps because Alex’s injury is so bad that it requires his personal attention.</p><p>“It must be amputated,” he hears Kyle say through a haze of pain.</p><p>“No,” he protests. “No, don’t.” He’d like to be able to say, in retrospect, that he begs for his limb so he can better fight for Michael, but in that moment, he is not thinking of his god; there is only sheer terror.</p><p>He struggles with what little strength he has left, but they hold him down easily, and shove leather into his mouth for him to bite down on. Kyle squeezes his hand, breathing a quick apology, and then brandishes an entirely different sort of blade from Alex’s own.</p><p>He tries to scream when he feels something wooden thrust into his hand. Looking down, he sees a carved figure of his god; rough, unrefined, but it is Michael nonetheless.</p><p>He is praying when Kyle begins to cut, and it does not make it hurt less, but he thinks it might be the reason he does not go mad from it.</p><p>He drifts in and out of consciousness for days, pulled under by soothing drugs, and does not know of the storms and the thunder, has no inkling that the battles are halted as the elements rage with such turmoil that it is impossible to see, to move, let alone fight.</p><p>His recovery takes weeks. Slowly, they wean him off the drugs that they gave him to keep him from screaming with pain (he still screamed), but his leg heals slowly. Kyle visits him personally every day, changing his bandages and checking for infection. Eventually, when he is recovered and lucid enough to stand, he learns to walk with the help of a crutch.</p><p>His father does not visit him, but Alex had not expected him too. The High Priest has more important things to tend to. The battle Alex had fallen in was decisive, allowing them to push their campaign forward, and there were tactics to decide. Alex was but one soldier among hundreds in the service of a divine cause.</p><p>But amidst all the pain, there is one blessing: he feels no more desire. Gone is the arousal, gone are the dreams of his god’s embrace and fevered kisses. He no longer wakes because of his body’s insistent need. Even when he tries to feel pleasure, his body resists.</p><p>Relieved, he prays to Michael with gratitude. With what is left of his legs, he kneels to offer words of benediction, and when his missing leg causes him to overbalance and fall, he thinks of it as prostrating himself.</p><p>Perhaps, he thinks, he has finally sacrificed enough to be cleansed of his impurities. Perhaps there is no longer a stain on his faith.</p><p>Finally, what is left of his leg has healed enough for him to be fitted for a prosthetic. King Valenti summons the finest engineers and artisans to craft it, with Kyle overseeing its fitting. Alex is a valuable soldier, the king insists, who must have the finest limb so he can keep fighting in Michael’s name.</p><p>His father offers no word of disagreement to that particular argument.</p><p>It takes Alex weeks to learn to walk with it, and he knows he will never walk as he did on two legs. But he fights on horseback, and though his missing limb will make balance difficult, he knows he can still fight. It takes him weeks of training to learn to do that, too, but he manages, thinking of his god every time an exhausting day stretches his body past its limits and pain shoots through it.</p><p>On some nights, when the pain is especially bad, and he allows himself tears in the darkness of his own rooms, he feels peace descending upon him, and he is glad his god has accepted his sacrifice.</p><p>But one night, a dream comes to him, the same one as before, of fevered kisses in his god’s embrace, and when he wakes, sobs wrack his body. He stumbles to the temple on a prosthetic he hastily threw on, ignoring the pain it would cause him later. He falls to the ground more than kneels and weeps.</p><p>“Have I not given you enough?” he whispers. “What must I do, for you to cleanse this impurity from me?”</p><p>Then he realizes what he has said, in his addled state. He has blasphemed, blamed his god for his own impurities, dared throw anger at him and make demands.  </p><p>He crawls to where the whip lies and flagellates himself until blood soaks into the cold stone, begging forgiveness. He will give everything, if Michael asks. His god must know that.</p><p>They find him in the temple the next morning, bloody and unconscious.</p><p>…..</p><p>Finally, finally, he can ride into battle again. He is missing a limb, but the ecstasy of killing in Michael’s name tastes the same. The sword in his hand moves as if of its own volition, cutting down his enemies, and he feels more powerful with each one that falls.</p><p>He may no longer be whole, but he can still be worthy of his god.  </p><p> </p><p>“You were not injured in battle,” his father remarks when he returns from battle, blood-spattered but intact.</p><p>“No,” Alex confirms. “I was lucky.”</p><p>Jesse hums; he clearly has a different evaluation of the cause than luck.</p><p>“You went to battle, and yet you did not spill blood for your god today,” he says. “You should rectify that.”</p><p>Alex makes no argument. He goes, instead, to kneel on cold stone that has soaked in so much of his blood that it is perpetually stained. On the altar, his god looks down upon him, benevolent and devastatingly beautiful, and that last thought is why Alex is here yet again.</p><p><em>Forgive me, </em>he begins as he always does. The whip is familiar as a lover on his back, though it is new; he uses them often enough that he has to renew them regularly.</p><p><em>I’m sorry, </em>he pleads his god to understand. <em>Please. Please take this weakness from me. </em></p><p>He barely even notices when the tears start to fall along with his blood.</p><p>There’s no answer. There never is, and Alex hits harder, because it must not be <em>enough. </em>It’s never enough, given Michael’s perpetual silence.</p><p><em>Cleanse me, </em>he begs. <em>Please. Only you can make me pure. I am not strong enough to do it myself. </em></p><p>The brightness startles him, and he raises his head to stare, barely able to make out the shape of his god.</p><p>He’s well and truly lost his mind now, he thinks. Perhaps he’s hallucinating from the pain and exhaustion, except that he can feel the rightness of it. Like a warm bath after a cold day, like sunlight after a bitter winter, like the sight of home after a long journey. There is no mistaking it; no one but his god could feel so <em>right. </em></p><p>He is even more beautiful in person is Alex’s first, damning thought. No wonder his god – <em>Michael</em>, his god has always been kind enough to allow the use of his first name- looks furious.</p><p>Despite his terror, he feels relief. Finally, his prayers answered, his god has come down to do with wrath and fury what Alex himself was not strong enough to accomplish in his devotion.</p><p>Michael steps toward him, and Alex bows his head, waiting.</p><p>Michael takes the whip from his shaking hands, and relief floods through him once again.</p><p>“Please,” Alex begs. “Punish me.”</p><p>The whip makes almost no sound as Michael throws it to the side, and sheer terror floods Alex at what Michael will do instead.</p><p>How weak he is, to feel so much fear warring with relief.</p><p>Michael kneels and tilts his head up, and Alex cannot help the gasp that escapes him.</p><p>Michael is <em>blinding. </em>He squints, and some of the light dims, though gazing at Michael still makes his eyes water. Perhaps it is a punishment in itself, that he cannot clearly see. He certainly does not deserve to see, if his first thought at the sight of Michael is always an impure one. Perhaps his god is kind today, sparing Alex that particular blasphemy.</p><p>Michael wipes the tears from his cheeks with his thumbs, and Alex blinks. He understands nothing of Michael’s gentleness, but he submits unquestioningly to his god’s will.</p><p>Then Michael moves to close the distance between their faces, to press their lips together, and for an instant Alex responds to the movement before he <em>remembers </em>and pulls away.</p><p>“I will not blaspheme,” he insists. “I may be full of sin, but I will not willingly sin against you, my god, no matter what test you put before me.”</p><p>“It is no sin, Alex,” Michael says. His voice sounds like music, like the love his father never gave him.</p><p>“You know my name?” he asks, but of course Michael would know the names of the greatest sinners.</p><p>“I know everything about you, Alex.” His name again, but it is spoken with reverence, and it should be a perversion, his god revering the name of a sinner. But his god is nothing but good; he sees the world with his divine clarity, and he does not lie. He would not revere something that is not good, and Alex does not <em>understand. </em></p><p>“There is no sin in you,” Michael says. “You are purer than any human who has ever prayed to me.”</p><p>Alex wants to argue, to insist, but who is he, mere broken mortal, to contradict his god, when his place is to accept with faith? And for all his sins, Alex has never lacked faith.</p><p>So instead, Alex cries again, the first tears he has spilled out of something other than despair.</p><p>“Oh, <em>Alex,</em>” Michael says, and Alex thinks there might be no greater blessing than his name on Michael’s lips.</p><p>Michael leans forward to kiss him again, and this time, Alex lets him, because his god wants, and what his god wants cannot be wrong. But what Alex wants <em>is, </em>and he cannot reconcile that within himself, until the taste of Michael’s lips chases all thought, and there is only the greatest ecstasy he has ever known.</p><p>Michael’s hand touches his shoulder, and suddenly there is <em>warmth, </em>and his knees no longer ache against the stone floor, and the cold of it no longer seeps into his bones.</p><p>Behind him, he hears an inhuman cry, the very sound of horror ripped from within a living being. He startles, but Michael rises fearlessly, pulling Alex up with him and catching him when Alex’s tired limbs stumble. But his warmth is gone, and Alex feels keenly his nakedness, though the pain that had set his back afire is gone.</p><p>His father stares at them in sheer horror.</p><p>“You are no son of mine – <em>blasphemy </em>– under a sacred roof – “ he sputters.</p><p>“The only one to blaspheme here is you,” Michael thunders, all the music and warmth gone from his voice. It is the booming storm now, and his father cowers. “He is pure and you are full of sin.”</p><p>His father gives one last wretched cry and falls to the ground. The last glimpse Alex has of him is what he thinks madness might look like.</p><p>Alex stands beside him, trembling with cold and awe, as Michael removes his cloak and wraps Alex in it. The fabric is soft as silk and warm as sunlight, inhuman and perfect like everything that Michael is.</p><p>“Come with me,” Michael offers.</p><p>“W-what?”</p><p>“I have watched you for many years, Alex. I have come to know all that you are. You have earned a place among the gods for yourself, so I ask you, come and take that place by my side.” </p><p>“Is this another test?” he asks. He has always found it so difficult to know what his god wants from him, but that is the reality of faith, he supposes. “What answer would you have of me, to prove my devotion to you?”</p><p>“You have proven it a thousand times over. All that’s left is for you to accept.”  </p><p>Michael could simply take, Alex thinks. It would be his right. But instead, Michael offers a hand and waits, still glowing softly in the darkness of the temple.</p><p>Alex places his trembling hand in Michael’s.   </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Chapter 3</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Michael takes him to a castle perched in the clouds, white as snow lilies and gilded at the edges. </p><p>"You will know what it is to be loved by a god, and one day, you will believe yourself deserving of it," he tells him.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Trigger warnings continue in this chapter for internalized homophobia, self-worth issues, and attempted self harm. But Alex is making baby steps towards recovery, and Michael is trying oh-so-hard. </p><p>Thank you for reading! The past few days have been hard for Malex shippers, to say the least, and if you're still around and clicking on ao3 links, you have my gratitude- and here's hoping that this wildly AU version of Malex fulfills you in some way while canon is off being a mess. </p><p>Thanks as always to @winged-fool for her support and beta-ing of this chapter.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Michael takes him to a castle perched in the clouds, white as snow lilies and gilded at the edges. It is even more beautiful than the myths have described, and he knows he does not deserve to be here, but he is weak, and longs to be in the presence of his god, even undeserving.</p><p>Michael leads him to a balcony with a breathtaking vista, and as he steps outside into the clouds and is buffeted by the breezes of the rarefied air, he is hit by vertigo. Nearly stumbling, he clings to Michael for purchase before he even realizes how much he’s overstepped.</p><p>“I’m sorry,” he rushes to say. “I am unworthy,” he adds, as if his god does not know, as if a god needs <em>reminding </em>of human fallibility.</p><p>Michael looks at him with such gentleness that it breaks him in a way no whip ever could.</p><p>“I have told you, there is no sin in you,” Michael says. “Humans knew that once, before they corrupted my word and my image.”</p><p>“So what I have known of you is wrong?” Alex asks.</p><p>“Not all of it,” Michael says. “You have known all that I am in a way no other human has, and you have loved and worshipped my truest self. But you have allowed corrupt thoughts to poison you.”</p><p>Alex trembles as Michael’s words echo his father’s so closely.</p><p>“Not the poison you think of,” Michael continues, as if reading his mind, and perhaps that is one of his powers. “The poison is the hatred you have of yourself, not the love you have for me.”</p><p>“It is impure,” Alex protests.</p><p>“No love, if it is true, is impure.”</p><p>Michael reaches out, a gentle touch of the knuckle to his cheek, but his god’s gentlest touch burns him, and he startles. Michael withdraws his hand, and Alex feels the loss immediately.</p><p>“I will show you,” Michael says. “You will see that you are deserving of the love I have for you.”</p><p>“Love?” Alex repeats, like the word is foreign. It may as well be, for the only love he has ever known is that which he has for his god.</p><p>“Yes. You will know what it is to be loved by a god, and one day, you will believe yourself deserving of it.”</p><p>Alex clings only to the thought that Michael is a god, and he cannot be wrong.</p><p>……</p><p>In that palace in the clouds, Michael gives him chambers more luxurious than he’s ever had, even residing at the King’s court as the son of the High Priest. There, his rooms had been barren except for the simplest necessities – rugs and tapestries to keep the cold out from the stone walls, and statues of his god. But here, the walls are all intricate carvings and gold filigree, birds and leaves and flowers that render him dizzy in their profusion. The bed is bigger than he’s ever seen, all soft silks, and the pillars that frame the windows are similarly intricately carved.</p><p>When he looks outside, all he sees is clouds, and he does not dare stick his head out for fear of vertigo catching him again. </p><p>Equally luxurious baths adjoin his chambers, covered in pearlescent tile. Alex eyes them with fear, because he could so easily slip on them when they’re wet, but Michael only touches his shoulders and says “you won’t get hurt here,” and Alex believes him.</p><p>The bath itself is the size of a small prayer alcove, the tiles covering its bottom twisting into mosaics of mythical creatures – though perhaps, here, in the palace of the gods, there is no myth, only what is real.</p><p>“These are yours,” is all Michael says, and Alex gapes.</p><p>“Mine? What am I to do with all this, my god?”</p><p>“Simply be,” Michael answers. “Live. You have suffered so much, but you need to no longer. You will want for nothing from this day on.”</p><p>Alex stares without words. He does not understand.</p><p>Michael gives him the freedom to roam the palace as he wishes, but each room is an onslaught to his senses in its richness. He sits by Michael’s side at every banquet, piled high with the finest delicacies, fruits and sweetmeats, and Michael always ensures he receives the tastiest morsels. Ambrosia flows freely, though Michael stops him from drinking too much of it, for more than a few drops can put a mortal into endless sleep.</p><p>There is music, too, so much music, played on every instrument Alex can possibly imagine by beautiful, half-naked men and women clad in translucent silks that threaten to slip off in the soft breezes.</p><p>Michael dresses Alex in the same finery. He offers the opaque silks that would barely cover his body, but Alex refuses; his garb on earth had always been more modest. So Michael dresses him in darker fabrics, silk embroidered with gold thread and velvet, all soft to the touch. But they are heavy, the gems stitched onto them making them even more so, and their cut impedes his movements. He could not swing a sword in them, could not fight.</p><p>Michael offers him jewels, too. The first time, it is a winding coil of gold and diamonds that he tries to drape like a snake around Alex’s neck and shoulders as Alex stands, half-dressed, in the luxury of his chambers.</p><p>“I do no deserve such indulgences, my god,” Alex protests, but Michael just smiles.</p><p>“I want you to have it, and anything else your heart desires.”</p><p>But Alex does not desire these gems. He wants only to worship his god, but Michael smiles when he sees the gold glinting against Alex’s skin, so Alex bows his head, helpless against his god’s unfathomable whim to treat him as a prize.</p><p>Michael’s next gift is a leg. It is gold, and yet light as air, finely molded as if by a sculptor. It is all his god’s ingenuity and all his imagination in one.</p><p>Alex falls to his knees when Michael offers it to him.</p><p>“You shouldn’t have,” he protests.</p><p>Michael smiles indulgently at him. “I’m a god of creation,” he points out. “So I created, for you.”</p><p>“Thank you,” he whispers. “I do not deserve it.”</p><p>“You lost a limb in my name. The least I can do is replace it,” Michael says, and Alex has no counterargument to that. He still protests when Michael kneels to put it on him, but Michael silences him with a glance. </p><p>Its edges fit seamlessly, painlessly, to where Alex’s leg ends, and when he walks, it’s almost as if his limb has been returned to him.</p><p>“Thank you,” he says.</p><p>Michael smiles like a child given candy. “You’re welcome.”</p><p> </p><p>Alex has helped conquer many temples and many cathedrals, but he has never seen any like the one Michael brings him to. It reaches so high that its ceiling is invisible, dark as a starless sky, while its pillars, carved intricately with leaves and flowers, are a forest as he walks among them. In parts, where light falls on the ceiling enough to see, it is done in blue and gold tile that must have once sparkled like the night sky, and the windows are of stained glass, which he has only seen in broken and shattered form up until now. These are delicate gossamer webs that bear the colors of the rainbow, frivolous and breathtaking all at once in their beauty.</p><p>It is magnificent, and Alex falls to his knees in awe.</p><p>Michael just smiles fondly at him. “I didn’t make it myself, you know,” he says.</p><p>“But you inspired it,” Alex replies, still kneeling. “Without you, it would not exist.”</p><p>Michael’s smile turns wicked. “That I did,” he agrees. “I may have…<em>inspired</em> the architect.”</p><p>Alex stares. “You – “</p><p>“You’re not the first mortal I’ve touched, Alex. Though you <em>are </em>the first I’ve taken away to be with me.”</p><p>He gazes back up at the vaulted ceiling, sees the pristine ratios and complex calculations that make it possible for it to stand, tall and proud. He doesn’t know how he could compare with someone who created <em>this, </em>but it sparks his wonder at what else might exist in the world, beyond what he has known.</p><p>“I wanted you to see what is possible, in the world, beyond what you have known,” Michael says softly, as he offers a hand to help Alex stand. “There is love, and light, and beauty.”</p><p>“It is magnificent,” Alex agrees. “But yours is the only beauty that I need.”</p><p>He had thought his god would be pleased with such devotion, but Michael just looks sad, and whisks him away back to their palace in the clouds.</p><p> </p><p>He has been with Michael a week when he asks for his sword.</p><p>“Why?” Michael asks, frowning. “You have no need to fight in battle, and our walls hardly need defending.”</p><p>“I miss the feel of the sword in my hand. Is that not also a way in which I worshipped you? I would have it again, if only just to practice.”</p><p>And Michael does not deny him. He doesn’t know how Michael finds it, but he does, the sword that King Valenti had gifted him with for valor in battle. It still fits perfectly in his hand, its balance impeccable. Stripping the rich silks and brocades, Alex relishes his freedom of movement as he goes through the familiar strikes and feints in a vast hall adorned with weapons. It feels good and right, muscle memory more than conscious effort, but it is still not the same as battle. He longs to spill blood for his god, but he will humbly accept this allowance from his god, that he can move through these choreographed gestures, at least.</p><p>He is so caught up in that thought that he doesn’t immediately notice how the scars on his back don’t pull when he extends his arm.</p><p>Frowning, he returns to his chambers and finds a mirror. Twisting around, he tries to catch a glimpse of his back and freezes.</p><p>The scars are gone, his back smooth as a babe’s. He stares, so shocked that he doesn’t notice Michael enter.</p><p>“You healed them,” he says without preamble, awed. Then, realizing his boldness, he casts his eyes down. “My god,” he adds.</p><p>But Michael ignores his misstep, approaching to trace the scar on Alex’s shoulder, where an enemy had plunged a sword into him.</p><p>“Yes,” he agrees. “And I would heal the rest, too.” His hands begin to glow faintly, the barest suggestion of his powers.</p><p>“No!” Alex says, before he can stop himself. “No, don’t, <em>please,” </em>he adds, his tone one of entreaty rather than demand this time. “Leave them, my god.”</p><p>Michael frowns.</p><p>“Why? They are only reminders of pain.”</p><p>“Because they are <em>mine,”</em> Alex says. One of the few things that have ever been truly his.<em> “</em>They define what I am.”</p><p>“You have no need to be that anymore,” Michael says softly. “You have worshipped me beautifully, but you can put that pain behind you.”</p><p>“I have nothing to put in its place,” Alex whispers. “And it terrifies me.”</p><p>“As you wish,” Michael agrees. Then he smiles, blinding with the light of a god, as he traces the scar on Alex’s chest, and Alex’s terror fades immediately.</p><p>“I do like them,” he admits, a god offering a confession. “I grew stronger when you spilled the blood of your enemies.”</p><p>Alex has no words for that, for is it not gods that give humans strength, not the other way around?</p><p>“Then I will wear them proudly,” he says, “for I earned them in your honor.”</p><p> </p><p>They spend hours upon hours together as Michael shares stories with him: the true versions of the history Alex had learned, witnessed firsthand; vivid details that the books and scrolls Alex had read once, in secret, didn’t mention. He laughs at what the poets and historians got wrong as he brought ancient ages to life. Alex kneels at Michael’s feet and listens, enraptured; Michaels hands always find their way to his hair, and he lets his eyes flutter closed, and rests his cheek against Michael’s thigh, and listens to his god’s voice. He has a gift for storytelling, and Alex falls in love all over again.</p><p>When Michael ends the stories, it’s usually with a lament at how the world has changed, and Alex aches to wipe the melancholy from his god’s face. But Michael just smiles down at him then, and tells him to live and be happy, because that is all the wonder he needs, and Alex bows his head and <em>tries. </em><br/>
<br/>
</p><p>He watches the other gods. They are promiscuous regardless of gender, no thought given to who might see. Isobel dallies with a human named Rosa, whom she had plucked from the earth millennia ago when the demons in her mind had made her anathema to her own people; Max is smitten with a beautiful woman named Liz, human too and just as old. Neither shy away from displays of their affection, and the other gods, too, parade around with lovers, most of them demigods and nymphs or other gods.</p><p>But they are immortal, divine. They are allowed what he is not.</p><p> </p><p>That night, he’s kissing Michael, and it’s sweet and oh-so-right, his god’s gentle hands in his hair, his lips soft as his tongue slips into Alex’s mouth. It’s warmth and it’s light and it’s –</p><p>He wakes to darkness. He’s in a soft bed, more luxurious than he’s ever been allowed, and it’s so <em>wrong, </em>his traitorous mind offering him visions of sin as he lies in comfort he doesn’t deserve.</p><p>He jolts up, seeking desperately for a whip or a knife, but there is neither by his bedside and he remembers why, remembers where he is though he shouldn’t be –</p><p>He digs his nails into his palms until they bleed and gasps for breath, but it is not nearly enough.</p><p>He wanders out into the antechamber, decorated with candles (unnecessary to light Michael’s palace, which seems to glow on its own, but he’s always loved the ambiance). Desperately, he grabs candle after candle and dumps the hot wax onto his skin, but it is not <em>enough, </em>the small jolt of pain each one offers but a joke to the way his skin should be <em>on fire </em>with it -</p><p>He freezes, staring at the flame of a candle, wondering, so intent on it that he barely notices Michael enter and take in the sight before him.</p><p>Then Michael comes to kneel before him. So wrong, that too, that Michael always kneels before him. But he would be mad if he claimed it made him any less a god.</p><p>“I’m sorry,” he whispers, not knowing whether he’s apologizing for hurting himself or for not hurting himself <em>enough. </em></p><p>“I have told you there is no sin in you. Why do you believe the words of a human over your god?” His face is thunderous, and his voice thunders too, and Alex bows his head penitently.</p><p>“I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I know you’ve forbidden it, but it is the only way I have ever earned your blessing. When I slept in your temple after spilling my blood, you wrapped me in warmth and peace in reward for that penance, and now you forbid it – “</p><p>But Michael is startled, horrified, a god lost for words. “No –No, it was not a reward for your suffering. I wanted to offer <em>comfort, </em>when your demons plagued you so much that you spilled your own blood.”</p><p>“I thought you wanted my blood,” Alex confesses.</p><p>Michael shakes his head adamantly. “Not like that. Never like that. I am a god of war. I live on blood and rage and death, but I never asked you to destroy <em>yourself </em>in my name.” He looks sadder now, as he shakes his head again and traces Alex’s palms with his thumbs, where his own nails had bitten into skin. “Humans will always corrupt what is good. But you - you are the only good, pure one among them, the only one they have not corrupted.”</p><p>All Alex can do is sob, and Michael holds him, and there is no thunder in his face as he presses their foreheads together. Alex soaks in his warmth greedily, bracing for the moment when it will be taken away again.</p><p>“Don’t cry,” Michael murmurs. “Let me take you to bed. We can talk about this in the morning.”</p><p>Alex just nods, but the tears won’t stop coming as Michael guides him patiently to the bed, kisses his bloody palms and tucks his trembling body under the blankets.  “Sleep,” he soothes. “Forget your pain for a while.”</p><p>Alex is about to protest the impossibility of that when Michael touches two fingers to Alex’s forehead, and he falls into a calm softer and more encompassing than the feather bed he lies on, then into a dreamless sleep.</p><p> </p><p>He wakes surprised to find himself in a bed rather than the stone floor and looks instinctively for the statue of Michael, but there is only windows spilling sunlight into the room.</p><p>Walking out of his bedroom, he finds Michael awaiting him.</p><p>“My god,” he says, surprised.</p><p>“How do you feel?” Michael asks.</p><p>“Good,” he says honestly. “You granted me peace without the penance to earn it.”</p><p>“I didn’t withhold it because I thought you didn’t deserve it, Alex,” Michael says, and he stares, surprised. “I cannot give it to you often because it is like a drug, for humans. You grow addicted, and then you want nothing but that forgetful bliss. You forget to live. But <em>never </em>was it a reward for punishment.”</p><p>Michael rises and walks over to him, holding his face gently in the palm of his hand. “There is no sin in you. Think of it as a test of faith, if it helps to believe it,” Michael offers, but that just makes Alex want to sob even more.</p><p>He <em>believes </em>Michael, even if what he says differs from what his father has preached to him his entire life when he claimed to speak for Michael. But every fiber of his being still screams that he is tainted, unclean, unworthy<em>, </em>no matter how much he <em>knows </em>that Michael speaks the truth. For as long as he can remember, he has woven into the core of his being the knowledge that he is <em>wrong, </em>and that in itself is blasphemy, to fail at having faith when his god asks for it.</p><p>It makes him ache for punishment even more. His hands itch for a flogger, and he wants to beg Michael for a whip. But his god does not want his blood, and there are no knives and no whips to be found anywhere. Each one of Michael’s touches is gentle, and he showers Alex with comforts, the softest silks, feather beds with half-a-dozen pillows, sweet wines and expensive delicacies, and each one makes Alex want to peel off his skin and crawl out of his body because each one reminds him that he is undeserving of them.  </p><p>He wakes in the night, digging his nails into his skin, and has to resist the urge to claw himself open. His bed is too soft, and he ends up sleeping on the floor, the way he’d always curled up in Michael’s temple. He sobs quietly because his absolution is undeserved, and yet his god forbids Alex from purifying himself.</p><p>Finally, he can take it no longer, and he kneels before Michael, sobbing.</p><p>“Please,” he begs. “Allow me pain. l need it. I cannot stand my own existence without it. I have loved you and I have worshipped you my entire life. I have given you everything. Let me have this one thing, <em>please.</em>”</p><p>Michael kneels down by him, and he looks sad, and hurt, but he brushes the tears from Alex’s eyes, gentle, and the touch makes Alex <em>shudder. </em>He sobs again, for how unworthy is he, if he shudders at his god’s touch?  </p><p>“If you need it so badly, it is yours,” Michael says, and relief floods through Alex. “But on one condition.”</p><p>“Anything,” Alex says immediately. He cannot possibly think of a cost too high.</p><p>“What I say is enough is enough. I will grant you pain, and you will not seek to inflict any more on yourself than what I give you.”</p><p>“I swear,” Alex says, relieved, because if his god is the one to inflict it, there is no doubt that it will be done right.</p><p>Michael bids him undress, and he does until he stands naked before his god. He had no shame in it, for his body has always been entirely Michael’s, in blood and devotion, and Michael knows all of him. And besides, there is nothing sexual in the heated gaze with which Michael looks at him; the tension is of a different sort entirely.</p><p>Michael ties him spread-eagled to the bed, and he is surprised to discover that the rope is rough hemp rather than soft silk, raw against his skin if he moves, though he has no intent to struggle against his restraints.</p><p>Michael lines up rows upon rows of candles, wax pooling around the wicks of each, and Alex’s heart thunders with excitement and longing when he sees them and knows that soon, he will feel their kiss against his skin.</p><p>Michael summons the candles one by one to his hands with godly powers, allowing him to spill an endless cascade of hot wax onto Alex’s body. He begins with the most tender parts – Alex’ nipples, the insides of his thighs, where the wax slides over his skin like tears. He jerks in his restraints, his body’s unbidden response to the pain, and Michael only smiles indulgently and continues.</p><p>It burns, and it is finally <em>enough, </em>the pain so present he does not have to chase it. It embraces him like an old lover, and he sinks gladly into the embrace until he can bear to be in his own body again.</p><p>Michael is methodical as he continues to pour the wax neat rows over Alex’s torso, tracing Alex’s ribs in neat lines, not forgetting an inch of Alex’s sides or the crease where hip meets thigh.</p><p>“Thank you,” he whispers, eyes brimming with tears of gratitude. “Thank you.”</p><p>Then Michael pours drops of scalding wax into the hollow of his throat. Shocked, he tries to gasp, but it is like a vise around his throat, rendering him completely helpless, and all he can do is soundlessly form Michael’s name on his lips.</p><p>When he blinks his tear-stained eyes open again, Michael’s very fingers are alight with a flame, and he traces the wax covering Alex’s body until it bubbles again. Gasping, he arches off the bed to seek more of that flaming touch, Michael’s name on his lips like a lover’s.</p><p>Michael brushes the tears from his eyes but says nothing, and the gentleness of his touch is welcome now, that at last it is deserved.</p><p>After, Michael undoes the restraints with a flick of the wrist and helps him to his feet, guiding him to the baths. His skin is red and tender from the wax and the ropes, and he feels like he has been scourged clean. When he sinks into the hot water, his gold leg resting safely by the edge, it scalds his raw skin, and again he feels purified with the burning pain.</p><p>…..</p><p>Having Alex beneath his hands, in perfect surrender as he uttered prayers of devotion in his pain, that had been a tiny taste of the power that had thrummed in his veins when Alex had worshipped him, before, with blood and prayer. But Alex had wept and suffered then, hating his very being, and Michael will never force him into that life again, no matter how intoxicating and heady the feel of power in Michael’s veins.</p><p>Alex deserves better.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Why yes, the description of the cathedral was inspired by Notre Dame, as well as by one of Baudelaire's poems, Correspondances, which talks about pillars become a forest (of symbols). I'm a literary person, y'all. There's gonna be literary references.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Chapter 4</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Michael keeps asking himself what in the universe he thinks he’s doing.</p><p>It’s been literal ages since he interacted with humans. Frustrated by them, he’s long stopped keeping up with how they think, and only the vaguest outlines of their actions have registered upon his attention over the centuries.</p><p>Until Alex.</p><p>Alex had captured his full attention.</p><p>But whatever had possessed him (a quaint human express, for he is a god, and <em>he </em>is the one that possesses others), he wonders, in thinking he could mend the parts of the human that are broken, when he can’t even figure out where the cracks are?</p><p>Not that he regrets bringing Alex here. He likes having the human here, by his side, knowing that he has plucked him from the endless misery and pain that had been his existence to bring him somewhere safe.</p><p>But the rest –</p><p>He goes to Isobel, who, despite her initial doubts when Michael had descended to pluck the human out of his life and drop him among the gods, seems to have taken a liking to him. Then again, she’d once done the same.</p><p>“What am I doing, Izzy?” he asks her, over drinks in her airy chambers. They sit by the windows, a soft breeze ruffling them, the bubbles in their crystal chalices fizzling pleasantly.</p><p>Isobel had always loved her small pleasures.</p><p>“What if he’s not better off here? What if I should’ve left him on Earth, with his kind?” he asks, even though he doesn’t believe a word he’s asking. But maybe even in that certainty he’s wrong.</p><p>“Michael, he was hurting himself in your name because he believed you thought him broken,” Isobel says pointedly. He seems to have touched a nerve. “He’s better here.”</p><p>“But he’s not <em>happy,</em>” he says. “The other day, he asked me to hurt him, Izzy. He begged me for pain because he couldn’t live without it. What do I do with that?”</p><p>She fixes him with a piercing glare.</p><p>“Did you do it?” she asks.</p><p>“Yes,” he says.</p><p>Her glare intensifies.</p><p>“You didn’t see the way he begged me for it, or how much happier he was, after,” Michael protests.</p><p>Isobel regards him silently, thoroughly unimpressed.</p><p>“You see what I mean?” Michael goes on. “I’ve given him everything a human could ever want, but everything good I do for him seems to hurt him, while any punishment I inflict seems to make him happier. I don’t understand, I’m just doing what you did with Rosa – “</p><p>“Rosa was different,” Isobel snaps.</p><p>That had been millennia ago, when Isobel had been caught and enchanted by a dark-haired beauty, cursed with voices in her head that she tried to quiet with poison in her veins.</p><p>“She’d had to struggle to live, every day,” Isobel says. “She was cast out by her own people for being different. Cursed, they called her. She needed to know she was in a place where she couldn’t be touched by anyone again, ever. But only for a time.”</p><p>Michael thinks back. In retrospect, Rosa’s recovery seemed like a blur, almost a miracle cure worked by a goddess who loved her, and Michael hadn’t really been paying attention then.</p><p>Now, with his own human on his hands, he realizes that while he may be a god, he doesn’t know how to work this particular miracle.</p><p>“And then?” he presses.</p><p>“Once she’d purged the demons from her mind, she didn’t want to be <em>safe </em>or protected anymore. She thought that caged her, kept her from discovering who – what – she wanted to be. So I did what she wanted. I refused to treat her like a prize.”</p><p> “I’m not – “ Michael beings to protest.</p><p>“You <em>are,</em>” Isobel insists. “You dress him up in riches and hide him away from the world because you want everyone to see the charming human you’ve found to be your prize after millennia of insisting you don’t want one. But he’s wasting away, and you can’t even see that. He needs <em>more</em>, like Rosa did.”</p><p>Michael rubs his temple in frustration. He had thought it would be simple, bringing Alex to safety and comfort and simply…letting him heal. He wants to believe it’s that simple, that he’s performed the entirety of the miracle and giving what he needs to the one human who has ever mattered to him.</p><p>…..</p><p>Alex asks him for pain again, kneeling with bowed head and downcast eyes, as if in prayer to the god who stands before him.</p><p>Michael is merciful, in granting his prayer.</p><p>It is the strangest of tortures, which Michael seems to have approached this with the keen mind of a craftsman. He’d ordered Alex to strip, as always, and then to kneel, pushing aside the soft rug in favor of hard stone, and Alex sighs in relief when he sees it.</p><p>Michael plucks at one of his nipples, and Alex gasps. His cock begins to stir against his will, and terror floods his body. Will that be part of his punishment, the humiliation of his stained desires?</p><p>“My god – “ he begins. </p><p>“I have no intention of giving you pleasure,” Michael reassures him. He has something in his hand that he now places on Alex’s nipple, hardened by Michael’s clever fingers.</p><p>Alex gasps again, this time for a different reason, as the metal of what must be a clamp squeezes the tender nub.</p><p>Michael does the same to his second nipple.</p><p>He attaches ropes to those clamps, and instinct tells Alex to lean forward, to lesson the tension there. It is only with an effort of will that he remains still as Michael attaches those ropes to the wall, so that the clamps pull at him and bite ruthlessly into his skin.</p><p>How clever, he thinks, before he focuses completely on the pain. His own willpower requires him to continue the punishment, much as the flagellation had, in the past.</p><p>Perhaps Michael is testing him. Perhaps, after all his generosity, he wants to make sure that Alex is worthy of it.</p><p>Alex stays as still as he can.</p><p>Silently, Michael walks around behind him.</p><p>“Wrists behind your back,” he orders, and Alex obeys instantly. His attention is focused on remaining as still as he can, and it is only after a few seconds that his mind catches on to what his mind is doing, realizing that his wrists are being bound with leather cuffs whose insides must be studded with something sharp, because Alex feels the pinpricks against tender skin. Then, his arms are wrenched backwards, painful enough that he must bite back a curse, and attached to a rope that, by the sound of it, must be attached to the other wall.</p><p>He understands now.</p><p>He is caught between two pains, and if he moves to lesson one, it increases the other. An inescapable torture that allows him just enough movement to trick his mind into thinking that he could free himself if he tried.</p><p>It is exquisite.</p><p>He stays as still as he can, trying to find that perfect point of equilibrium where the two forces working upon his body can be optimized to cause the greater agony.</p><p>But he is unused to this sort of punishment, and it is a harder thing to endure than the forthright pain that Michael had meted out before. it is the kind of thing his father would never have thought of, would perhaps have even sneered at given how intimately Michael touched him to realize it. Flagellation had always been a straightforward thing, and the closest he’s come to this kind of punishment is the time he was captured and they’d strung him up for hours by the wrists.</p><p>Perhaps it <em>is </em>a test, or an escalation. But he cannot know Michael’s mind; he can only endure.</p><p>His body <em>aches, </em>his muscles sore, the stone floor digging into his knees, and all those clamps and needles seem to bite harder into his skin with each the minute. The urge to move and lessen some part of the pain increases. He even gives in to it for a moment, for he is allowed, is he not? Michael has ensured that no matter how he moves, the pain will remain, his constant companion. His clever, clever god, who will allow a desperate human no reprieve, no matter how much his weak, recalcitrant body seeks it.</p><p>His breathing shudders, uneven now, and with those breaths, he begins to recite the prayers he’d learned, long ago. Across the room, he hears Michael’s delighted laughter.</p><p>“You know I can hear you, right?”</p><p>“Yes,” Alex breathes out.</p><p>But Michael doesn’t tell him to stop, so he continues, lips forming the words almost instinctively, and when he reaches his favorite prayer, Michael gasps.</p><p>“I have not heard that one in centuries,” he admits, and Alex thinks his body aches less with those words. </p><p>…</p><p>Some prayers – true prayers – make him stronger, and Alex’s have always been true and pure. Now, when Alex shapes the words of them with his lips, his faith true even as he bears the pain his god has inflicted, Michael’s power thrums inside him like lightning in his veins.</p><p>It is intoxicating, and again Alex has no inkling of what he’s capable of, his head bowed in submission as he accepts the agony he believes he deserves.</p><p>The second the last grain of sand falls in the hourglass Michael has set to time Alex’s punishment, and Michael sends the bonds flying with regret.</p><p>Alex’s prayer ends with a stuttered gasp, and Michael ruthlessly squashes the disappointment he feels as the intoxicating power inside him abates. He catches Alex’s weakened body, which starts to keel over like a puppet with its strings cut – literally – and carries him to bed. “Thank you, my god,” Alex murmurs as Michael lays his exhausted body onto the silk sheets.</p><p>He waits until Alex is asleep, then places a kiss on the top of his head.</p><p>Alex looks peaceful, for once, but Michael keeps thinking back to his prayer and the thrum of power in his own veins.</p><p>Isobel was right, he realizes. He is Alex’s entire world. The source of his need for pain, but also the soothing balm in moments of agony. He knows nothing else, and Michael wants it all, every drop of that devotion that is a headier drug than the touch of a god to a human.</p><p>But he shouldn’t want this, shouldn’t have it.  If he wants this human he’s fallen in love with to be happy, Michael can’t gorge himself on his devotion. He needs to give Alex <em>more. </em> </p><p>……..</p><p>The next day, Michael whisks him away from the palace for the first time since he’d shown Alex that breathtaking cathedral. He takes Alex around the Earth (and yes, it is round), to hallowed structures with round and ogival arches, beautiful temples built in perfect proportions, studded into pristine mountainsides like gems.</p><p>He shows him castles that reach the very clouds, sculptures that are larger-than-life, cities built on mountains. Marvels of engineering, bridges and aqueducts and irrigation systems.</p><p>“Humans know how to work wonders, just like gods,” Michael tells him.</p><p>And the things Michael shows him are indeed miraculous, accomplishments to rival the gods themselves. But -  </p><p>“Why me?” he asks. “I could never create anything that could be measured against these marvels, and not be found wanting.”</p><p>“You underestimate yourself,” Michael says. “I have heard the songs you wrote in praise of me. If humans still knew anything of beauty, they’d have told you that you’re something of a prodigy.”</p><p>Alex stares, incredulous. He had only thought to worship Michael with the notes he strung together, to create something that had even a fraction of the sublime; he had never thought himself remarkable.</p><p>“You were the only one who saw the truth of me,” Michael continues. “You created and destroyed in my name, and you excelled at both. No one has done that since the last cathedral crumbled.”</p><p>Whisking him back to his lily-colored palace, Michael shows him libraries upon libraries of books and scrolls, and he greedily devours them, human histories and divine myths long-lost, more stories than he could ever read in a lifetime, words upon words that open vistas to him far beyond the dreary grey stone walls he has known all his life.</p><p>Michael still tells him stories of humanity’s history, Alex perched at his feet, but now he also reads the words of the best poets, collected painstakingly by Michael over the centuries. He finds more instruments than he had thought possible, and he begins to make music again. He composes songs in honor of Michael, and his god always loves to listen to them, a smile on his face as Alex plucks at the strings and sings for him. Sometimes, e closes his eyes, but mostly he watches Alex intently, looking – enraptured, if a god could be so by a human.</p><p>…….</p><p>He needs the pain less, now that he has something to fill his days with. Under his god’s gaze and with centuries of masters to learn from, his creativity blossoms, music taking up much of his time. There are even moments that he forgets his own desperately flawed humanity – those beautiful moments when he brings that look of rapture to his god’s face, and feels like, with his god’s patience and generous coaxing, he has been able to realize whatever potential he possesses. But then he remembers that his is human, and forever tainted, and in those painful moments of remembrance, he begs for the violence of his god’s touch.</p><p>This time, Michael holds him down with godlike strength, and he doesn’t fight it, yielding to the hands around his throat. His eyes brim with tears of gratitude as his lungs burn, and he relaxes into the pain of it. His eyes flutter closed, and the very last bit of breath he has before he falls into blackness is devoted to Michael’s name.</p><p>He comes back to consciousness gasping for air, sucking in desperate lungfuls of it as Michael straddles him and holds him down like a helpless bird. He waits until Alex’s breathing calms, and then he returns his hands to Alex’s throat.</p><p>When they are finished, Alex traces the necklace of bruises around his throat admiringly. Michael reaches for them, but he catches the god’s hands and kisses them. “Please,” he asks, the memory of pain and helplessness emboldening him. “Leave them.”</p><p>Michael nods, but reaches for his neck still and traces the marks he’s left with gentle fingers. “As you wish,” he murmurs.</p><p>Alex wears the marks proudly until they heal.</p><p>….</p><p>Alex lies still beneath him as he squeezes the air from his lungs, reciting reverent prayers that flow through Michael’s veins as pure, molten power. They stutter to a stop as Alex slips away into darkness, and Rath wakes inside him then, roaring in pleasure, drunk on the life he holds in his hands, his so completely and without protest.</p><p>When Alex wakes, sucking in desperate lungfuls of air and murmuring gratitude to <em>Michael, </em>Rath waits patiently until he has calmed, then continues what <em>Michael </em>began, his grip more brutal around a delicate human throat, and Alex’s prayers are even more fervent and adoring this time, his loss of consciousness quicker, his gratitude fuller when he wakes again. The power is more intoxicating than that of a thousand normal human prayers.</p><p>Michael wrestles with him inside his own mind, but he keeps that softer side locked away. This is a task for Rath, and if he gains both pleasure and power from it, well, is that not due to a god?</p><p>Days later, Michael finds Alex in front of a mirror, admiring the bruises as he presses down on them. Michael frowns, instantly protective, but Rath wakes inside him again and hums with pleasure, coming up behind Alex and placing his own hands over Alex’s fingers, encouraging him to press down harder until Alex winces from the pressure on tender skin.</p><p>After, Alex kisses the knuckles of the fingers that had been around his neck in gratitude, and Rath preens inside him.</p><p>Michael, meanwhile, wrestles with himself. Alex asks for pain less, now, and he knows that is good. It means his human is happier, than the self-hatred that had led him to water Michaels’ temples with blood is abating. But in surrendering himself to Michael, Alex had inadvertently woken Rath, and Rath lives for surrender.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Yeah, so, uh, Michael's a god with absolutely zero concept of our human ethical and moral frameworks, and zero understanding of trauma. He's not a trained therapist or the patient partner of my arranged marriage fic. And Alex is so fucked up he doesn't even understand how fucked up he is. I promised y'all recovery, but I never promised that the path there wouldn't be Problematic. It is what it is, in this alternate world where gods literally exist and the being Alex has worshipped his entire life is actually in front of him now. </p><p>I don't know why I felt compelled to put in that disclaimer, except that I see the usual "ao3 hosts problematic fic" posts making the rounds in response to ao3's fundraiser, so. </p><p>In the next chapter, Alex, Michael, and I will be dealing with all his issues around sex and desire. I kind of have no idea what I'm doing, so I don't know when that'll be finished, and generally thinking about it makes me emit a whining sound like a broken dishwasher, so. We'll see.</p>
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